Battery Performance with Google Now & Without

I have the Moto X Force (Droid Turbo 2), which I love and has a fantastic battery.

Since getting the Marshmallow update about 8 weeks ago, I noticed that my usual battery life (avg. 16hrs off the charger with about 50% left) dropped to about 25% left.

Now, this is still OK - 25% left after a full day with 4hrs+ SOT is dandy, but I was bothered, nevertheless.

I always have my GPS on, and set to Battery Saver, and just use the high accuracy as and when I need it. Howvere, I did notice that turning Google Now off made the difference. Now it's off, my battery stats are back to normal. Yeah, I miss out on Now on Tap etc, but the extra 25% is more important to me.

I've experimented with this a little bit and have found that turning off location history but leaving Google Now on makes a huge difference with battery. So you won't get the types of Google Now cards that location history provides but you'll still be able to use Now on Tap and most of the important cards. I also have my location set to battery savings mode

Yeah... it all depends on your usage. I leave everything on full blast, and utilize a lot of tools in Google Now (location, cards, etc) and the power drain of those services is minimal.

As for how much power it'll draw... there are a million factors. If you are moving around a lot (Google Location Services), your phone, your software level, what apps call for location, etc. Every single person is different, so what works with one person is a waste of effort for another.

For someone who has been using these services for quite some time (and obsessively monitoring battery usage), I can say that, as a whole, Google's services use significantly less power than they did back when they really kicked into high gear in KitKat days. And it is noticeably better optimized in 6.0 than it was in 5.0/5.1.